Jewish Autonomous Oblast

The Jewish Autonomous Oblast is a federal subject of Russia in the Russian Far East, with Birobidzhan serving as its capital. In 1934, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin created an autonomous oblast in the Far East in order to establish an alternative to Palestine as a Jewish homeland, hoping to combat Zionism, as well as to settle the remote and vulnerable Far East. This led to the oblast being the only official Jewish entity apart from Israel, but the percentage of Jews in the oblast was minuscule. During the Great Purge of the 1930s, Stalin targeted the Jews in the oblast in purges, but the percentage of Jews in the region grew to 25% in 1948. That same year, Stalin's anti-Jewish purges made living in the oblast unappealing, and the Jewish population substantially decreased. By 1989, only 4% of the population was Jewish, dropping to 2% at the time of the 1991 Dissolution of the Soviet Union and to .2% by 2018. In 2010, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast had a population of 176,558 people.